"In the wake of the Best Book announcements posted on photo-eye Magazine we often encounter many more contributions to this "award" after publication. This year on the photo-eye blog, we posted Grant Willing's response to our best book list (originally posted on Humble Arts) and now Andy Adams, the noteworthy founder of Flak Photo, and LiveBooks and RESOLVE blogger Miki Johnson, have contributed their own response. As a follow-up to their hugely popular online discussion The Future of the Photobook (a follow-up to Joerg Colberg's post on Consciencious), Adams and Johnson have listed here their 10 most exciting photobook related projects for the 2009 year including print-on-demand books, newly founded blogs, not-for-profit publications and many other photography projects. We hope you enjoy this unique contribution to our Best Books lists."--Melanie McWhorter

For a month starting in early December and prompted by a FlakPhoto feature of Blurb's Photography.Book.Now winners, we conducted cross-blog discussion exploring the question, "What will photobooks become over the next decade?" More than 50 bloggers from every corner of the photo world contributed posts with their ideas. An equal number of people added their comments on RESOLVE, especially on our three final discussions, mediated by top bloggers, examining innovative means of creating, consuming, and funding photobooks. One of our goals for this experiment in crowd sourcing was to pool the collective wisdom of so many thinkers to find the most exciting photobook projects going on right now. Below is a list of our favorite 10 (in no particular order) -- you can find even more fascinating projects and publications in our complete Future of Photobooks coverage.

1. Jörg Colberg (Conscientious) and Hester Keijser (Mrs. Deane) launched The Independent Photo Book in early January. The project consists of a blog where photographers can send their independently produced and distributed books and zines, along with information on how to purchase them, creating a simple online clearinghouse for visual texts -- 70 so far.

2. Although this book contains no photographs, it is nonetheless the most futuristic book idea we came across. It is a physical book that you read by taking a photo of it with your cameraphone, which converts an abstract digital image into words, which update automatically every week from a keyword search on Twitter. Get it? Just watch the video. We promise, it's cool. (via Jonathan Worth)

3. A country road. A tree. Evening is a "film in progress" art project installed on a digital tablet and sold through a gallery. We're not sure if it's a book -- or even if it's physical or digital -- but it's definitely thinking outside the box. (via Harlan Erskine)

5. The collaborative online essay project Words Without Pictures, a simple blog format that became something of an online phenomenon, is now available as a physical book through the print-on-demand service, Lulu and soon to be printed by Aperture. (via Larissa Leclair)

7. Small runs of myriad unclassifiable art books became available this year through the new Lozen Up shop, the physical extension of the LOZ blog photography showcase. (via Laurence Vecten)

8. The international multimedia piece Around the World, Street Photography in B&W highlights a growing movement toward collaborative creative projects, spurred by the ease of contact provided by online communications as well as the increasingly isolated nature of creativity in a digital world. (via Francesco Gallarotti)

10. The Obama Time Capsule, a book released early this year by A Day in the Life creator Rick Smolan, is a print-on-demand book documenting the historic election. The true innovation (and something we're sure to see more of) is readers can add their own images to the book and received a personalized (print-on-demand) version to not just commemorate the event but incorporate it into their own family history. (via Jonathan Worth)

One of my favorite art magazines, Art on Paper, has ceased publication. Always illuminating, Art on Paper focused on paper-based art including limited edition prints, portfolios and books from contemporary artists. After downsizing to a smaller format, the magazine still had severe trouble raising advertising dollars to pay for their overhead.

Advertising dollars spent for magazines is at an all time low. It's an uphill battle for any magazine to be able to survive these days, including those on the web. Though new internet magazines are sprouting up daily, most are labors of love and many will fall by the wayside unless a successful business plan emerges.

Will the impending announcement of the Apple tablet save magazines like these? I'm hopeful and even a bit optimistic that it may be able to, but magazines will still need to find advertising revenue in order to survive.

Here's the Art on Paper email I received over the weekend.

"Dear readers, friends, and advertisers of artonpaper magazine,
Forty years after the founding of the Print Collectors Newsletter, our predecessor, it is with great sadness that we announce the temporary closure of artonpaper magazine.
Emotionally, this has been very hard for us. We know, for instance, that the magazine's absence will leave an important segment of the art world - namely, publishers of limited editions prints, multiples, and artists' books - unattended at a difficult time. Nevertheless, all of our efforts to ride out the recession (reducing the magazine's size and thereby cutting our printing costs in half, laying off staff, creating other revenue streams) have proved inadequate in compensating for the 65% drop in advertising revenue we experienced over the past year and a half.
We want you to know that we did not go gently. In addition to making drastic changes to our daily operations, and exploring a variety of long-term strategic options, we also spent six months looking for new financing, possibly even a new owner. We set January 15, 2010 as a final deadline. When that date arrived without an investment, we had to close shop.

It is certainly our hope that six to twelve months from now, when the economy has improved, someone new will come along and revive the publication, either in print or digital form. In the meantime, if you are a subscriber, please email circulation@dartepub.com for an auto-response on what this means for your subscription and what efforts we are making on your behalf.
We know that this comes as bad news to many, and we want to thank all of you who have been so supportive of artonpaper over many years. Your encouragement has meant the world to us, and it was because of you that we remained in publication as long as we did.
Sincerely,
Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett
Co-Publishers, artonpaper magazine"

AT THE AGE of 93, Charis Wilson has seen more than most people ever will -- and the art world has seen more of her than almost any other woman in the history of photography. As Edward Weston's lover, writer, companion, driver (Weston never learned to drive), and model from 1934-1945, Charis left an indelible imprint on Weston's work and the way in which his photographic nudes are examined.

Can you give a brief history of your work with photo-eye Auctions, beginning in Santa Fe and expanding to NYC?

EM: I started working with photo-eye in January of 2004, just a few months after the auctions launched. Initially, I was hired to do cataloging. As with many positions at photo-eye, job descriptions have a way of rapidly expanding to include many other tasks. Thankfully, in my case, most of these had to do with administering the auctions: cataloging, scanning, and working with consignors. Within about six months, they had become more or less my exclusive domain. For this reason, the move to NY in the fall of 2007 was pretty much seamless. Being in NY, I obviously get out more and am able to secure more and better consignments.

Much time had passed since my days in Austin. I still own Grazda's first book, and knew now there was a follow up book, Afghanistan Diary 1992-2000, which chronicled the following ten-year time frame in the life of Afghanistan. And there was also a book regarding the Masjid in New York. Doing what we do today when we try to find something or someone, I Googled Ed, and low and behold there he was. An email address. I wrote to Ed, he wrote back, and a few short days later I was sitting in his apartment with a tentative list of questions and slightly sweaty hands.

Charis Wilson, who was lover, muse, model, amanuensis and wife of the photographer Edward Weston and the subject of many of his best-known nude portraits, died on Friday in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 95.

Subhankar Banerjee's photograph, Caribou migration, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 2002, was used to illustrate Tim Flannery's article in the New York Review of Books.

It is often argued that cap and trade legislation requires too many compromises with--and give-aways to--polluting corporations to pass the House and Senate, and that consequently it is ineffective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. While environmentalists are failing to support cap and trade, those opposing action on climate change are fiercely attacking it. Yet such a system is essential when it comes to getting global action on climate change--not least at the increasingly imperilled climate summit in Copenhagen in December--for it delivers a transparent benchmark by which nations can judge each other's commitment.

I remember staying up late on July 20th, 1969 and watching those blurry video pictures of the moon landing with so much anticipation and awe. That there could be live video transmitted from the moon was breathtaking in and of itself. How amazing that we could see grainy pictures of the landing and Neil Armstrong stepping off the Lunar Lander onto the surface of the moon for the first time. In fact, the blurriness of it all left so much more to the imagination than today's high definition video could ever impart. Finally a great optimistic dream was realized amidst the horrible unrest of the Vietnam War and the 1960s.

Now we've learned that through an incredibly stupid bureaucratic decision, the original video tape that recorded this historic event was written over for "budgetary" reasons.

However, all is not lost as several other recordings were made around the world. Now, the same technical wizards who have transferred to digital and restored various black-and-white Hollywood movies are in the process of resurrecting this incredible footage, making it far clearer than was originally seen on television.

Also just released by NASA are photographs of the original moon landing sites made by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Yes, we now have verifiable evidence that we did indeed land on the moon! In some of these incredible pictures, you can see the astronauts footpaths (see above).

And finally, today, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing, NASA and Google announced the launch of the Moon in Google Earth, an interactive, 3D atlas of the moon, viewable with Google Earth 5.0.

To view the Moon in Google Earth, open Google Earth 5.0 and switch modes from "Earth" to "Moon" on the top toolbar. To learn more about the Moon in Google Earth, visit: earth.google.com/moon